The Four Big Questions About Donald Trump’s Chances

Donald Trump’s path to the Republican nomination has become a lot clearer over the last month. Some prominent members of the party’s beleaguered establishment have backed him against Ted Cruz, and Mr. Trump now leads in Iowa. It gives him a chance to run the table in the early states over a still divided field of mainstream candidates.

But Mr. Trump faces four big questions that will decide whether he can go from a strong contender to the Republican nomination.

Will his voters turn out?

Mr. Trump clearly fares best among infrequent voters. What’s less clear is how many will turn out, and just how much it will hurt if they don’t.

Even so, Mr. Trump could well underperform the polls. The potential for that looms largest in Iowa, a caucus state where the race is close. A recent poll by Monmouth University found that Mr. Trump’s seven-percentage-point lead would evaporate with an ordinary turnout. He would be in a dead heat with Ted Cruz, who has strong support from traditional Republican voters and a strong organization.

Mr. Trump can win the nomination without winning Iowa, but it gets a lot harder. It would deny him momentum and the chance at sweeping all of the early states. It would strengthen Ted Cruz, who would be positioned to fare well enough in the South to block Mr. Trump from building a significant delegate lead on Super Tuesday. It would buy time for an establishment that might need it.

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The news media can’t seem to get enough of Donald Trump.CreditMonica Almeida/The New York Times

And it would raise questions about his standing in the polls elsewhere.

How much has he benefited from a favorable media environment?

Mr. Trump has benefited greatly from receiving the preponderance of news media coverage since entering the race. And it has also helped that the Republican candidates have largely shied away from attacking him, even as they have spent tens of millions of dollars on ads attacking one another.

That’s not to take away from his standing in the polls. There’s no longer very much evidence to support the view that there’s a low ceiling on his support. Clear majorities of Republicans express favorable views of him, and say they could support him. He now holds nearly 40 percent of the vote in national polls — a tally that can easily yield a majority of delegates against a split field, as it would have for John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012.

But it’s an open question whether Mr. Trump could retain all of this strength in the face of concerted and coordinated attacks against him. He simply hasn’t faced anything like it.

Why? He has benefited from a classic collective action problem: It’s in the interest of the mainstream candidates to defeat him, but it’s in no single candidate’s interest to attack him. The major candidate who may have attacked Mr. Trump the most, Jeb Bush, has done so fleetingly in a few debates. The Right to Rise super PAC, aligned with Mr. Bush, has spent far more money attacking Marco Rubio.

To those who have seen Mr. Trump defy all expectations, the notion that a few campaign advertisements might bring him down might seem a little far-fetched.

But to win the nomination, he will have to win a lot more than the base of voters who have supported him since the summer. More traditional Republican voters may not back him in the face of new questions about his past statements, and those attacks should increase as other candidates rise and receive more attention than they have.

How quickly will the field narrow, and who will emerge?

One of the biggest reasons Mr. Trump holds such a large lead is that the party’s mainstream establishment is deeply divided. Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, John Kasich and Chris Christie are all in the race and attacking one another.

They’re all weaker as a result: It keeps donors and endorsements on the sidelines, it keeps the candidates from concentrating on attacking Mr. Trump, and, most obviously, it splits a large number of mainstream conservatives.

Eventually, the number of mainstream Republicans will most likely dwindle to one. That will probably bring a surge in the polls behind a wave of endorsements and the consolidation of the mainstream vote, which is likely to yield additional media coverage and support as well.

But for now, the mainstream candidates all remain clustered near 10 percent in New Hampshire, the most obvious opportunity for voters to winnow the field. Mr. Rubio and Mr. Kasich appear to be best positioned to lead the mainstream pack, but there’s a lot of time left and plenty of opportunities for Mr. Christie or Mr. Bush to gain.

Mr. Trump has a better chance the longer it takes for the establishment to get its act together. If he wins Iowa, it’s even possible he steamrolls to the nomination before it even gets a chance.

Will the ‘party’ decide to fight to the end?

The case against a nomination triumph for Mr. Trump has always rested on the assumption that the Republican elite — whether consistent conservatives, the religious right or establishment-minded moderates — would uniformly and vigorously oppose him to the end. The party has ample reasons to oppose him. He’s a true outsider with profound general election vulnerabilities and iconoclastic views on core issues.

But there are more reasons than ever to question whether that assumption, which once seemed fairly obvious to me, is right. For one, the long-awaited campaign against Mr. Trump simply hasn’t materialized. More recently, many Republican leaders have signaled they might be willing to settle for him, especially if the alternative is Mr. Cruz. There are even signs that some believe Mr. Trump is acceptable, regardless of the alternative, perhaps because they think he’s someone they can deal with.

If Mr. Trump takes an early lead, how many party leaders will decide to criticize someone who could easily become their nominee, and spend the millions of dollars in advertising they’d probably need to knock him down? How many will acquiesce? In the end, this is the question that could decide the race.